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Overview

A major survey of the visual arts that lie outside the Western tradition.

In this major survey of the arts of Africa, Western and Central Asia, India, Southeast Asia, China, Korea, Japan, the Pacific, and the Americas, author Michael Kampen-O’Riley presents the vast range of arts that lie outside of the Western tradition. Within a predominantly geographic and chronological framework, he explores the arts of these areas from pre-history to present day. The first dedicated survey of “non-Western” art, Art Beyond the West is amply illustrated and accessibly written.

Learning Goals

Upon completing this book, readers will be able to:

To recognize regional and period styles.

To understand styles in terms of the basic ideals around which they were created

See the connection between idea and form.

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Meet the Author

Dr. Michael Kampen O’Riley (PhD, History of Art, University of Pennsylvania, 1969) is a Professor Emeritus, University of North Carolina.

While working as a columnist for the Charlotte Observer, he shared in a Pulitzer Prize Journalism and Public Service given to the Observer in 1981 for the Observer’s columns devoted to the daily lives of their readers. He has taught at the Philadelphia University of Art; the University of Florida; Yale University; Arizona State University; the University of North Carolina Charlotte; California Polytechnic Institute Pomona; and the University of Stockholm, Sweden.

He has authored seven books, published over 300 articles in news papers and magazines, and given over 10,000 lectures and guided tours through museums and historical sites in the United States, Latin America, and Europe. He is presently living in Asheville, North Carolina and writing text books, self-help books, and novels about Native America and the visual arts.

About his work, the author says, “My work puts special emphasis on the contextual character of the visual arts. The arts have always existed in many active give-and-take or autocatalytic relationships with the world around them. The arts absorb ideas from religion, philosophy, politics, society at large, and every other area of thought; forge their own forms of visual expression, and, in turn, they influence the world around them in ways that only the visual arts can do.”

Preface

Art beyond the West surveys the art traditions of Africa, India and Southeast Asia, China, Korea and Japan, the Pacific islands, and Pre-Colombian and Native America. These traditions are often called "Non Western." Although the term is tendentious insofar as it defines the material it covers in terms of the West—that which is not Western—it has no intended negative connotations.

The arts of these diverse cultures from around the world, many of which have existed for thousands of years to the present, represent multiple and distinct lines of cultural development. Texts have surveyed these areas individually or in groups, focusing on Asia, or Africa, the Pacific islands, and the Americas. The art of these diverse peoples, accounting for about half the lands on earth, are included in this study for readers who want a comprehensive survey of all the major art styles in the vast world beyond the West.

Separate chapters are devoted to each of the regions in which the major nonwestern art traditions have developed. Varieties of Islamic art that developed in Africa and Asia are examined in context with those areas. Individual chapters in the text are organized around large geographic areas and survey the arts within them through history as they related to certain all-important and pervasive cultural ideals. This approach to the art beyond the West explains it contextually, in terms of the thinking of the artists and patrons who created it. Below is a brief introductory survey of the ideas around which the chapters in this text are organized.

Additional information supplementing the text is located in boxes within each chapter. Boxesfocus on important technical, methodological, cross-cultural, and aesthetic issues related to the text. While the boxed information is as important as the text itself, it is presented in this manner because it is specialized and detailed material that lies outside the mainstream and flow of the text.

This text uses many terms that may be new to most readers. They include academic terms used by art historians and other scholars and non-English words used by the people who created and used the art illustrated in this text. These terms are explained in context with the discussions of the art in the chapters to follow and they are assembled in glossaries at the end of the book. This system follows the familiar model of foreign language textbooks and it allows readers to test themselves on the vocabulary they will need to read each successive chapters.

Seeing the foreign terms and their approximate English equivalents, readers should remember that the full and original meaning of an African mask, a Japanese Zen Buddhist landscape painting, or a Maya temple can never be fully framed in the English language and understood by one who has not been part of the language and culture in which the art was produced. As a case in point, the Chinese meaning of qi, translated here as "character" or "disposition," will vary depending upon the context in which it is used, the time in which the writer lived, and a host of other determining factors. Yet, accepting these limitations, translations do help us understand ideas in other languages; while it is logically impossible fully to understand the art of another culture and time, the experience of encountering the many new concepts and ideas in this text can be enlightening. Some of the terms used in this introduction that the reader will need later in the book are listed in the glossary.

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